I just finished writing an email to my sister about that most essential of subjects: films inspired by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien.
(To clarify, I’ve been more-or-less homebound this month, and haven’t seen Desolation of Smaug yet; please consider these comments directed toward An Unexpected Journey).
We had been talking about the films, and she was surprised that I wasn’t bitterly disappointed in the Hobbit, as I had been infuriated the first time I saw The Two Towers. When I stopped to think about this, I was surprised too; The Two Towers is filled with intense, exhilarating, and even profound moments, and The Hobbit… isn’t.
Really, I approached the two movies with entirely different expectations. Way back in 2001, I had gone into Fellowship of the Ring as a deliberate skeptic, perhaps because I didn’t think the material would respond well to the Hollywood treatment, and I was very pleasantly surprised. With the exception of some maudlin plotting (ie. do we really need to see Sam drowning for no particular reason?) and some dubious physics (Leaning to move a 1,000+ ton pillar of stone? And how does the ranger who can evade ringraiths fail to notice a hundred orcs in armor stomping up a hill?), Fellowship was a very smart and carefully edited adaptation that wasn’t overly scrupulous to the source material, but which preserved its spirit and essence.
I went into The Two Towers expecting the same, and was disappointed by a script that seemed to give into blockbuster excess and illogic, and which strayed from the source material in far less interesting and coherent ways.
[Tangent: It’s worth pointing out that The Two Towers makes a lot more sense in the extended cut than the theatrical release. Some pretty-much essential scenes were cut in the latter; the scene where Aragorn tames the wild horse, for example. The horse will later rescue him, again from drowning. This is still empty calories (I don’t mind them cutting Tom Bombadil from Fellowship, but if he’s more superfluous than the magical mystery clairvoyant horse, I can’t see why) but it doesn’t do violence to the story. Other developments, like Faramir’s internal struggle do add something to the story, when we have the context to understand his behavior. The illogic of other passages — how do elves make the journey from Rivendell in a day or two that takes the Fellowship a couple months?! — is sloppy and avoidable.
But a few of the choices were downright unforgivable. I think, in particular, of the particular logic which persuades the ents to wage war against Saruman. This was a horrible misreading of Tolkien and does damage the story; in the novel, Merry and Pippin were able to persuade the ents to take action by essentially saying “we’re all in this together.” In the movies, the ents specifically reject that logic, and instead act in their exclusive self-interest. It was a jarring and disconcerting moment, that is all the more implausible because of the way it clashes with everything we have seen from the ents until that moment. (So they will not decide to go to war after days of debate, but a pissed-off shout from Treebeard is enough to get them going? Again, how do these lumbering trees cover ground in hours that took the orcs a day and humans several days?)]
The Hobbit, on the other hand, seemed to be doomed to mediocrity from the outset. Lord of the Rings was a 1000-page epic involving the ultimate fate of a fantasy world; it is far easier to justify a three film, ten-hour sprawl than for a slim children’s story. And I don’t buy Peter Jackson’s explanation that he was going with J.R.R. Tolkien’s own plans for a more complex, “adult” version of The Hobbit; Tolkien often didn’t recognize which of his own stories were the best or stood alone, which is why his publisher (very wisely) refused to publish The Silmarillion as the first part of Lord of the Rings. My attitude going into The Hobbit film was more, “well, it’ll be cool to see what the Arkenstone looks like.” And it was.
In short, I expected The Two Towers to be a coherent and insightful adaptation of difficult material, and was disappointed.
I expected The Hobbit to be a mediocre-ish but interesting take on a book I love, and it was pretty much exactly that.